I’m a Product Manager on the mobile team at Tableau. We’d love to have a conversation with you around anything mobile-related. Are you looking to provide mobile access to data across your organization? Do you have unanswered questions around areas like Mobile Device Management (MDM), user authentication, creating mobile-friendly content, and more? Do you have any ideas for future product enhancements? We want to hear from you. Anything is fair game!

We will be checking in on this thread regularly, responding to any and all questions/feedback. We will also be doing a LIVE virtual "office hours" session on April 5th to give you another chance to share your feedback. To register for the live office hours, go here: Dev Office Hours: Mobile

Love the reach out from the devs to the community!...thanks for taking the time.

We've only just started looking at mobile for our dashboards...so have started playing with a few ideas on what mobile versions would look like. First I'd like to say that I really like the Devise Manager, and is very cleverly thought out with exactly what get's inherited and what is customise-able. There is one area where we currently struggle, so would like to get your thoughts (or anything you are thinking about in the future). The issue is multi-select actions (basically what the CTRL+ does on laptop). We tend to keep filters to a minimum in our models, and prefer to offer actions (click on bars...etc.) for the use to filter the viz (for many "good" reasons)...however on mobile, unless the bars they want are together this is tricky. My idea would be that if you hold one finger over a bar, any subsequent actions with an "other" finger would add to the selection? Is there a gesture you are looking at to achieve this, or do you have a better way? currently we are putting little drop-down filters over the bar charts (which we can just add for our mobile versions), if the use wants multi-select.

I've been looking at/creating mobile content for about 6-9 months now and have made a couple of iPhone-based dashboards. Currently in talks with IT about adding the Tableau Server iOS app as a trusted Airwatch application (so as to not have users VPN into the corporate network). Unfortunately the ball has been in IT's side of the net for a more than a month with little feedback from them. Any other ***** I can lob their way so as to make use of the mobile platform more palatable for a security-conscience IT group.

Also, I'm wondering if there is any ability (currently or on the road map) that will allow the iOS app to be location aware with Mapbox Studio GL so I can provide content that would, for example, allow a salesperson to call upon a customer that is close to their current location and provide information about that customer to the salesperson.

The Port of Seattle is building a mobile program and we've developed several workbooks to date. We're creating educational materials, such as a user guide and best practice document. We're also going to track the outcomes of our implementation efforts, while releasing new mobile-optimized workbooks throughout the year.

As the year moves along, it'd be great to see other examples and best practices in building mobile dashboards, particularly ones that show tabular information, which can be tough to boil down into a mobile view.

Thanks so much for the feedback and the great question. Multi-selection by selecting discrete items is something that is on our radar as part of a larger effort to re-examine and improve the touch experience in Tableau. In a future 'selection' mode, selecting a mark doesn’t de-select the current one. I'll pass along your gesture idea of doing a press+hold+select to my colleagues looking at this.

Thank you for your question. We are working with Citrix on a way to integrate our app with their XenMobile MDM platform. There are a couple of enhancements needed to ensure the app can be fully 'containerized'. Stay tuned for more news on this topic!

(Out of curiosity, is anyone else in the community interested in integration with Citrix? Someone has previously created an Idea for it. I'd encourage you to vote up that Idea. We look in these forums as an input source as we're planning new product enhancements.)

Thanks for that Ted...Thanks for passing on my suggestion, although a "selection mode" does sound an interesting way (and would probably allow, more simply, the accomplishment of many other tasks which are currently easier/more-natural with a mouse)...I'm certainly not qualified here, so sure they'll have some niftier solutions!!

With regards the "selection mode", and some of the other cool things we saw at TC (cross-hair selection, and tool-tip banner, especially...as they both looked like great solutions)...are we likely to see these relativity soon (say in a beta version in next 6 months)?

Thanks so much for your question. I'm sure like most IT departments these days, they probably have a lot of projects on their plate so getting their attention can be tough. If they are concerned about the security aspects of this, one idea might be to share the Mobile Security Whitepaper we put together detailing how we approach security. That white paper was put together based on several customer conversations and the common questions that were asked. We might be able to help as well. If you work with your Tableau Account Team, perhaps we can see if setting up a special session with them to talk through their questions would be enough to get the ball moving on this. Let me know if I can help.

And thanks for your idea around maps. For our current Tableau maps, we have a Find Your Current Location capability that can center a map around your current location. Based on that, you can see the marks (customers) around that location and tap them to see more information -- for example, maybe a tooltip comes up. Is that what you are looking for? Another idea we're noodling on is location-based filtering. In other words, imagine you are a salesperson and you pull up to your customer. You pull out your tablet and are about to walk into the store. Rather than use a quick filter to filter your dashboard to that customer, imagine if Tableau could automatically filter based on where you are (GPS coordinates). Curious what you think about that type of enhancement?

Fantastic! It's great to hear what the Port of Seattle is up to. I love your idea around building a strong community around mobile and sharing best practices, examples, etc. One thing I know about the Tableau community is that people are "givers", and it would be great to get a bunch of us together to inspire and support each other.

Look forward to chatting with you today during the office hours session...

I wanted to chime in on one very exciting idea you mentioned. Location-based filtering using GPS coordinates would be of interest to us given the diverse portfolio of facilities that the Port manages. This would be a valuable enhancement.

What's the best solution for our users to test and verify their dashboards work well on mobile?

We have the device developer in Tableau but it can always be slightly different once you get into the real world. Ive tried emulating devices in chrome developer mode with mixed results. Our server is also behind a firewall meaning personal devices wont work. Our admin team has a single iPad for testing purposes.

Second question -

Is there any good way for server admins to audit or test content on mobile, first for functionality and second for performance/load times?

Thanks!

Ps if you reply, might be missing part of this webinar but I'll try to catch up afterwards!

For Question #1, apart from using a real physical device, I think the Chrome emulator is probably the next best option.

For Question #2, I think the answer is somewhat related. Testing via real devices in conditions similar to what users will be in (eg. is a user going to be out in a remote area with only 3G service, will they be in an office setting with fast WIFI and a newer model device, etc.) is certainly the preferred option. As you mentioned, you can also use tools like the Chrome emulators. For performance, it is also possible to take a performance recording so you can understand the end to end performance characteristics of a dashboard and understand what parts of the pipeline you should look at more closely.